


Soft Universe

by BloodMoonWitch



Series: Soft Universe [1]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Can Muriel's chest be a kink?, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Gender-Neutral Apprentice (The Arcana), Lap Sex, M/M, Other, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-24 21:37:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20365495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BloodMoonWitch/pseuds/BloodMoonWitch
Summary: Come here and pretend with me for a minute. Here's the basics:1. Lucio doesn’t exist here. Cause fuck him. He hurt my boy.2. Nadia and Pasha are cute queens together because nobody can stop me3. Muriel and Asra just lived their homeless child lives in relative peace and now they work in a shop together and oh heck who’s that new apprentice? Aw look they’re shy and cute and whoops Muriel falls in loveBasically, this is all to make the apprentice and Muriel switch temperaments. That’s really all the plot though the rest is just pure gentle smut.(Title is a beautiful song by Aurora)





	Soft Universe

**Author's Note:**

> Guess what time it was when I finished this?
> 
> The answer?
> 
> An unholy hour 
> 
> Man I have the sleep schedule of an actual bat someone help me

Asra is very good at reading people. He can take one look at Muriel and immediately know if he is happy or sad, tired or hungry, but then again Muriel isn’t very hard to read. He always smiles the widest and laughs the hardest, he complains violently when he’s hungry or when he needs a stiff drink. He gives the best hugs and always tells Asra when he needed to piss off and mind his own business. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and from what I can tell, Muriel has a wonderful heart.

He stood up for me a few weeks ago when Asra was unsure about taking me on as his apprentice. With one look at Muriel, Asra hired me on the spot, said that I was welcome to live here with them in the spare room upstairs. Or, he said with a laugh, I could share Muriel’s room. We both flushed at that, and Muriel told Asra to . . . do something unpleasant.

I’m not sure if it was always like this, and Muriel never comments on it, but Asra is away most days. He always uses one excuse or another: visiting his dangerously flirtatious doctor lover, going to the forest to search for herbs, or hiking up to the palace to see the Countess to help her with her odd dreams of demon goats and red beetles.

That left Muriel and I alone quite often to deal with customers, keep the shop clean, and restock the shelves at the end of every week. Even tonight, as soon as the last customer had walked out the door and the candle in the window was extinguished, he began to gather a few things to go on a date with Julian. Such things included a basket of various fruits, some candles, a bottle of wine, and, as usual, a long length of red rope. 

“I’ll be out all night. You two,” he says, throwing on his scarf, “try not to make too big of a mess. Or do . . .” With a wink aimed at Muriel’s blushing, mildly annoyed face, he swung the door closed behind him.

“He acts like were the ones who constantly make messes around here.” Muriel grumbles, walking around to stand behind the counter with me as I reorganized the chaos Asra had created on the shelves.

“Could he not simply just place the bae leaves back where they were before? Why are they all the way over here with the sage wands?” Each day presents a new task of figuring out what chaos Asra had caused and trying desperately to right it. Of course, learning magic was well worth the price of a few hours of cleaning, but it was beginning to feel like looking after a two year old child.

“You’ve seen how excited and distracted Asra gets when he’s with a customer. Making our jobs easier is the last thing on his mind,” he says, that familiar grin on his face as he leaned against the counter behind me. I have to grab a stool to place something back on the top shelf, and while up there, I notice what could be anything from a dead rat to a lump of Muriel’s wolf friend Inanna’s fur lumped together behind a jar of dried rose petals.

“Well, that’s not gonna be fun,” I mumble. Muriel laughs behind me, and I turn to see his head thrown back and eyebrows pulled together, a pained smile on his lips.

“What cursed entity is hiding out up there now?”

“I . . . don’t think I wanna know.” I move down to the lower step, focusing on straightening and reorganizing a middle shelf. Muriel was uncharacteristically quiet behind me, and I begin to think that he left until I feel a hand fiddling with the fringe at the edge of my shirt. I can feel how close he is, our heights finally evening out. Either a draft or his breath on my neck causes a shiver to run down my back. I won’t deny it, and neither him nor Asra were exactly subtle. I had been crushing on Muriel from the moment he first opened the door to their shop.

It was his eyes that had first caught my attention, so very green and kind and welcoming. There was a light in him that seemed to call to my soul. The next thing, of course, was his larger than usual size. The broad shoulders and muscular chest barely contained by a thin, sad excuse for a shirt. I had tried to quickly bring my gaze back to his otherworldly handsome face, but he had noticed me staring.

“I’m not a giant,” he had joked, and I caught my first glance at the most beautiful smile in the world, “at least not a very mean one.”

Now, as his hands travel from the edge of my shirt to hold my waist, I know that the shiver wasn’t caused by anything but the feeling of warmth coming from behind me.

He hadn’t tried very hard to hide his affection for me, always complimenting me or being overly eager to help out around the shop when it was just us, and Asra was constantly scheming to spark a flame between us.

In truth, I think what took us so long to confront our feelings was mostly . . . me. I will admit that I’ve never been a very outgoing person, the bravest thing I’d ever done was kindly and shyly ask a local magician for a job. I think that Muriel could see that I wouldn’t make the first move, so maybe this was him trying to initiate something?

I’m not brave enough to turn and face him, but I do lean back into his chest slightly. His hands slowly move up, sliding under my shirt to graze the bare skin of my stomach. My breath hitches, and I feel him huff out a gasp against my skin.

“Is this alright?” His voice is quiet, breath hot against my ear. I don’t even know where to begin to look for where my voice went, so I just eagerly nod against him. I could feel his grin against my neck, followed by a small kiss.

Why can’t I hold back the moan that falls from my lips?

I slap my hand against my mouth, face burning as I squeeze my eyes shut. He never stops kissing my neck, which is apparently extremely sensitive to his touch. It’s when his tongue pokes out to lick a thin line from the base of my neck to the skin right behind my ear that I let another noise slip past that even my hand can’t contain.

I should have expected him to, but he still surprises me when he reaches for my hand and removes it from my mouth, tightly holding it in his.

“Let me hear you,” he breaths, his other hand still moving upward along my stomach. “Please?”

The next sound I make is somewhere between a whimper and a groan, and judging by his widening grin, it's a sound that he enjoys.

He startles me again when he firmly grabs me by the waist and flips me, turning us so that I was sitting on the counter and he was leaning over me, still keeping his mouth busy on my neck. I’m boxed in by his bulky arms, one of his hands running through my hair to firmly hold my head back so he can kiss and lick and gently bite along more of my neck, and he uses the other to support himself against the counter. He uses one of his legs to gently pry mine open and settles his body between them, pulling me against his wide, firm chest, and he shortly pauses when I failed to stifle a moan.

“Can I keep going?” He sounds out of breath, and it is almost comforting to know that he is just as flustered as I am. I can feel my heart beating wildly in my chest, and I grip onto his shoulders with both hands to try and steady myself.

“Please,” I whisper from where I hide my face in his shirt, taking in deep breaths and enjoying the smell of him. He kisses down my neck, slowly pushing my top off of my shoulders as he kisses there too.

The hand in my hair pulls back, not too hard but definitely enough to get my attention. I allow my head to be placed so that my nose almost touches Muriel’s, our lips so close to kissing that I try desperately to lean forward to meet him, but he keeps me back. He stares into my eyes, deep and loving green captivating my soul.

“You are so beautiful,” he says, like it was a fact, something to be studied by scholars for years to come, as constant as the stars. I can’t take another second of his intense gaze, too afraid that I am about to burst, so I turn my head down as much as I can with his face so close, his hand still in my hair, and close my eyes.

“Why do you always say such embarrassing things?” It's true that he has a habit of always trying to make me blush or smile at him, and it usually doesn't take much.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice holding a genuine concern, “I can stop saying them if they make you uncomfortable.”

“No . . . I don’t . . .” I struggle to form the words. “They’re nice . . . to hear. It’s just a lot sometimes.” I finally wrangle up the courage to look up into his eyes, my heart still trying to throttle its way out of my chest. He offers me a tender smile, the hand in my hair moving slightly so that his thumb could rub soothing circles into my cheek, and I greedily leaning into the touch.

“I must make sure then,” he says, torturously leaning in closer and closer until our lips were once again just barely a centimeter apart, “to say as many embarrassing things as possible.”

_Oh_. I’d never heard _that_ voice before. It’s impossibly deeper, gravely and hushed like he’s trying to make me combust, and it sends another shiver down my spine. I feel like I never want him to stop talking, to say whatever he wants, it doesn’t matter as long as he keeps using that voice. But there are so many others things I was hoping for. . .

“Please . . .” I beg for something, anything, I just need him closer to me. I need him to be the brave one and take that first step. For a moment, he just stands there, looking at me with a heated gaze that has me terrified that he is going to tease me some more, and maybe that wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.

But when he leans in, when he finally kisses me, I know that nothing could have been more perfect. He is so gentle with me, soft lips and hands caressing my body. Every touch feels like both a feather's graze and desperate grasp, too much and not enough. It causes a tightness in my chest that I cannot explain, and I know that Muriel is the cause and the solution. 

“Muriel . . ." I say his name, but it sounds like a desperate prayer. Our lips don’t part as he lifts me up and carries me to his room upstairs. I wrap my legs around his torso to steady myself, and one of his hands moves to cup my ass. He uses that hand to grind me against him, but it only lasts for a moment, enough for a soft strangled moan, then he’s falling onto his bed with me.

I’m surrounded by his smell, like myrrh and wild flowers, a quiet forest, summertime, and so many indescribable things. And _him_. There’s no way to describe how deeply passionate and loving his hands feel against my skin as they began to push up my shirt, or the comforting weight of him settling on top of me, or his lips as they steal kiss after kiss from me before he pulls away.

He’s doing that thing again, holding my head back with a hand in my hair so that I can’t quite kiss him. It’s like he enjoys watching me, enjoys seeing the desperation he causes on my face as his hand brushes up high enough to just barely graze a nipple. I gasp against him, struggling between pushing into his hand and allowing my shyness to win. Like he can read my mind, he made a decision for me, firmly running his thumb right across the apparently extremely sensitive bud. My back arches as if it has a mind of its own, and I bite back a moan as Muriel does it again.

He looks hungry, like just touching isn't enough. In a moment of bravery, I reach down and yank my shirt over my head. Gods, it’s worth any embarrassment I might feel later to hear Muriel’s breath stagger, a deep groan resonating in his chest as I let him see me.

The rest of our clothes don’t last very long, and the feeling of our completely naked bodies being pressed together drags an embarrassingly long string of moans and whimpers from me as Muriel just keeps softly and slowly grinding against me.

“Please, Muriel,” I whine, because those are apparently the only words I’m capable of forming. I don’t think he minds, if his moaning voice in my ear is anything to go by. He shifts above me, planting one hand beside my head to hold himself up as the other moves torturously lower until I feel his fingers against my hole. There’s a warmth and slickness that shouldn’t be there, and I shudder against Muriel’s chest as he easily slips one of his fingers inside me.

“Asra taught me a bit of his favorite kind of magic,” he says, smiling down at me like he wasn’t pressing a second slick finger into me.

~ • ~

Somewhere across town, there’s a magician enjoying himself too much and a blindfolded doctor tied to a chair. He doesn’t falter for a second from his task, mouth filled with his lover as he kneels between his legs, but he can sense that something has changed. Through the redheads loud moans and cries for more, Asra can hear a singing coming from the direction of his shop. He just smirks and goes back to turning Julian into a whimpering mess. _Finally_, he thinks. 

~ • ~

Muriel takes his time preparing me, deft fingers stretching me out, reaching and pressing against places inside of me that had me clinging to him, whimpering into his muscular chest. After an eternity, he pulls them out, and I whine at the empty feeling. It feels . . . almost wrong to be without him inside me. The thought only brings a deeper blush to my already flushed cheeks.

A startled yelp escapes me as he flips us over, him sitting up with me in his lap. I feel his rather large erection pressed against me, and I moan as he thrusts up gently.

“What . . .” I try to ask, but it just comes out as a breathless whisper.

“I want you to ride me, if that’s all right with you.” How was he so casual with these things? I can’t meet his eyes, fidgeting hands still wrapped around his neck grasp for whatever they can find. “That’s only if you want to, okay? We can stop right now if you’re-”

“No,” I say urgently, “no I . . . I want you.” I never want him to think that I don’t. “I want this . . . I just . . . I’ve never . . .” I struggle with the words, unable to compose myself enough to admit the truth, but then his comforting hands find my face. He doesn’t force me to look up at him, he just holds me. He holds me as I try to find my courage, and it's easier with his warm hands on me. “I’m a little scared.” I manage to whisper, barely above a breath, traitorous tears forming in my eyes at the admission. They don’t seem to startle him as much as I thought they would have, he just keeps his hands on my cheeks, thinking for a while before speaking so softly that it almost hurts.

“We don’t have to do this now,” he whispers, “I can wait for you. But if you want to try tonight, I need you to know that I will never do anything to hurt you, I promise. I’ll stop if you ask me to, and I won’t push you or ask you why.” Somewhere inside me, there's enough strength to look up into his eyes, and in them, I find all the reassurance I need.

“I trust you,” I breath. He nods his head, slowly moving one of his hands down my body until it comes to rest on my hip. With one final glance into my eyes, like he’s asking for permission that I give him with a shaky smile and a nod, he moves me so that he’s positioned right at my entrance.

“You’re in control,” he pants into my ear, just barely thrusting up enough for me to feel him pressing in, and I gasp and tighten my grip around his shoulders. “You can move whenever you’re ready.” I try, I really do, but I’m shaking too badly and clinging to him too tightly. I can't seem to find it in me to begin, even though every ounce of my body is screaming to be filled with him.

“Muriel . . . I- I can’t,” I whimper out, and the words cause Muriel to panic and falter. I try to rush out more words before he thinks something is wrong. “Please, I need you to . . . please, Muriel, I need you. I can’t-”

“I’ve got you,” he says, seeming to understand now what I meant. The hand on my hip pushes me down, a gentle suggestion more than anything else, but it’s all I need. I’m so thoroughly stretched out from before, so it was like he had promised. There was no pain as he slowly pulled me down onto him, but the pressure and fullness of him had me crying out against his skin.

“You okay?” he asks, his voice finally returning from composed to breathless. I can do nothing but nod and bite my lip, hips twitching down of their own accord as I try to fill myself with more of him. My hips finally touch his, but they don’t stay their for long. I can’t keep myself still, lifting myself barely an inch off of him before the ache to be full again pulls me back down. I do this for a while, but it’s only when his grip on my waist tights, his breath shuttering against me, that I realize I must be tormenting him.

“You can,” I try to say, but I had to stop moving entirely and take in a deep breath before I can continue. “You can move too.” It was the least crude way I could think to say _please fuck me._ For a moment, I think he won't, but as I began to move up again, he pulls me up higher. The sweet drag of him inside me is a whole world of pleasure I hadn’t thought possible, and my head falls back as I moan when he pulls me down again, his hips thrusting up a little to meet mine.

He sets a wonderful pace, just slow enough for me to catch my breath every once in a while but fast enough to loose it again as he buries himself inside of me.

His hands had moved from my hips a while ago, but I hadn’t really noticed. They touch me everywhere, soft and loving as they can’t seem to stop moving over my skin.

I’m sure we both looked like messes. His hair is tousled from my hands occasionally running through it, and there’s sweat on his creased brow and straining muscles of his chest. For the first time, I really study his face, unashamed when he stares right back at mine. His eyes are half shut, cheeks flushed more so that usual, and his lips are a little red from all the kissing and lip biting. He looks almost relaxed, but the passion in his eyes gives him away. I'm sure I must look very similar, but I can’t think about myself when he is in front of me looking so kissable.

It’s tough, keeping our lips together as his thrusts and mine grow frantic, but we manage. Eventually, I have to break away to breath, but I don’t move very far. I never want to be far away from him, I want to stay pressed to him for as long as possible, but I can feel something rising up inside of me. Whimpering his name, I try to warn him, to tell him that if he doesn’t slow down, this will all end much quicker that I would like, but he silences me with another kiss. His thrusts became more erratic, the careful pattern he had set breaking away completely, and I know that he’s close too.

My undoing is his voice, the whole while we climbed towards our release he kept whispering such sweet things in my ear.

“I’ve got you . . . You’re doing so well . . . Gods, you look so beautiful . . .”

I can’t hold back anymore, every little thing was setting me on fire, and I slam my hips down against him one more time before I scream into his shoulder, a searing orgasm burning through my entire body. I clench tightly around him, shaking in his arms as he quickly thrusts up into me using what little leverage he has. He stops with sharp breath, trembling against me, and I feel something warm inside of me. A fresh rush of embarrassment floods my senses as I realize what it is.

I bury my face in his neck, my arms still wrapped tightly around his neck and his around my back. We stay like that for while, breathing heavily and shaking slightly against one another, but Muriel eventually has to pull out. He does so with such tender care and gentleness, comforting hands running up and down my back, and he pulls us back to lay on our sides on the bed. I don’t want to leave his arms, don’t want to move from where I’m safe and comfortable, and Muriel doesn’t seem to want to budge either.

Sleep was quickly trying to claim me, my mind already foggy from before, and I can’t fight it as I fell under.

I wake up sometime later to the sound of the front door opening, an empty bed beside me. Muriel must be downstairs finishing up what we had begun hours ago, and my suspicion is confirmed when I hear him greet Asra.

“So, what happened tonight?” Asra asks, his voice sounding much too impish.

“Nothing much,” Muriel lies. It brings an odd smile to my face._ Nothing much._

“Oh, come on!” he exclaims, sounding unreasonably disappointed. “I gave you two like five hours! That should have been plenty enough time to do _something_!”

“Asra-” Muriel sounds like he was scolding a child, but Asra’s laugh interrupts him.

“Something did happen! Oh, I knew it!”

“Don’t you dare-”

“Don’t worry, I won’t ask. I’m just,” his voice changes, turning more somber and genuine, “I’m happy for you.” They're quiet for a moment, but eventually, Muriel speaks again, his voice full of joy and love.

“I’m happy too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I may come back and add to this ending a bit later if I feel like it but for now, this is all I got. Heck, I may even have a few more ideas in mind for these two that may come along in the future. We shall see.


End file.
